I'm a London-based freelance business journalist writing for the UK broadsheet press. I'm also the author of 'The New Rules of Business', a book revealing the secrets of a range of entrepreneurs, and founder of the news website Minutehack.com.
Titles I have written for include The Daily Telegraph, The Times, Raconteur Media, The Financial Times, The Guardian, Real Business Magazine, The Marketer and LaunchLab.co.uk - a title I launched in 2007, which went bust in 2010.
I like clever entrepreneurs who create useful things and give people jobs. I don't like businesses that make money at the expense of people without doing anything good; I'm sure you can think of a few.

Proof That Twitter Is A Terrible Market Research Tool

It is often said that Twitter is a great gauge of the public mood: want to know what everyone’s talking about? Just go to the “trending in your area” section of the website and have a look – it’s all there in order of importance.

People who regularly sip technology Kool-Aid will tell you that this is meaningful, when, from a research point of view, it’s not. The fact is what’s trending is often just the strongly held beliefs of a relatively small niche of social media users.

So if you’re researching public opinion for a university course, or trying to find verification that your business idea has a broad and enthusiastic target market, then prepare to think twice.

First, a look at the stats

In September, one of Twitter’s Big People announced that the website had climbed to 15 million monthly users in the UK. An impressive figure, particularly as it represented growth of 50 per cent compared with May the previous year.

Note the age of the wearer (Photo credit: Robert Scoble)

But even if we assume (maybe wrongly) that this means 15 million people and not 15 million accounts (which can be owned by organisations, and single individuals can have multiple handles) then one-in-four Brits access Twitter on a semi-regular basis.

But note also that four in 10 users prefer not to tweet and instead are happy to quietly read what other people are saying in a sort of crowd-sourced newsfeed. It means that nearly half of Twitter’s users are generally silent – ie they don’t express an opinion.

Removing these passive accounts, on Twitter there are really only nine million active UK accounts/people – less than one sixth of the population. Admittedly it’s still a good sample for research, but which sixth are we talking about?

It’s not the numbers that make Twitter an unreliable gauge of public sentiment, it’s the demographics. According to Media Bistro, only 18 per cent of online adults in the US use Twitter, compared to, say, 71 per cent who are on Facebook.

Is Twitter flooded with hormonal pre-teen One Direction fans? Not quite, but as you’d expect the user base is pretty young. A study of nearly 1,500 over-18s on Twitter by the Pew Research Centre shows that just under a third were aged 18-to-29, 19% were in their 30s and 40s, 9% were 50-to-64 and only 5% were older*.

The point of all this is that researchers must take Twitter-based evidence with a pinch of salt. It’s good for a lazy snapshot of media-savvy opinion, but not for real trends going on across the world right now. Here’s a good example from the UK:

UKIP embarrassed on Twitter, but wins anyway

Twitter is famous for its social media fails: brands and organisations that try to drum up support by encouraging people to post supportively, but get a barrage of mockery instead (search for “NYPD Twitter fail” for a recent State-side example).

Such a fate befell the digitally much-maligned UK Independence Party (UKIP) when it created the hashtag #whyImvotingUKIP (why I’m voting UKIP) ahead of the European Elections in May. Predictably (surely!), what came back was a flood of comedy references involving popular UKIP slurs.

It was extremely funny, but what everyone thought was the death knell of a silly party was nothing of the sort. In fact, the faux pas (which went on agonisingly for several days fuelled by a media storm) barely registered at the ballet box – and UKIP did better than even it dared to dream.

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